Hey all.

I will admit, I haven't used a printed module for, well, just about any game system in decades. However, I have a friend whose 12-year-old son wants to get involved in 5th ed. D&D, and has never really done the gaming thing before. He wants to run for his friends, and he's looking for something simple for the beginner. Anyone have any advice on something commercially (or otherwise) available to help him with the heavy lifting?
This message was last updated by a moderator, as it was the wrong forum, at 13:54, Wed 19 July 2017.

The D&D Starter Set is ideal for this as it contains all the basic rules, dice, pregenerated characters and an adventure: The Lost Mines of Phandelver. It's a great introductory adventure and worth the price of the entire set by itself. The Starter Set has everything they will need for many hours of entertainment.

A hundred times this.  The Starter Set for 5e is actually fantastic.

I recommend that he sit down with his friends and find out what kind of adventure they want to play and then work together to make that happen.

I found the 5e starter set to be kind of weak when compared to similar products.  It would probably work for this, but I disagree that it is "fantastic".

An alternate suggestion would be to look at Adventurer's League modules, which run ~$4 each.  I haven't played any of them, but given the popularity of the thing, I expect they're not bad and probably pretty easy to run (since they kind of have to be).

The D&D starter set is fantastic.  I ran it for my group of fairly experienced players, and they all had a great time.  It is compact, but offers a lot of different facets of the D&D experience (open-world exploration, dungeon crawling, a city/village hub with roleplaying and politics) without too much intrigue and complexity.

For new players, though, it definitely relies on an a DM with an even hand and a nonconfrontational demeanor.  The first few encounters (in the goblin cave) can brutalize a party, especially one that is a man down, and might need a bit of scaling back until the PCs level up.

It does have a few total blowout encounters (exercise caution in the abandoned village...), but overall, as far as all-in-one boxes go, it's definitely one of the best I've got in my collection.

We had a TPK in the caves, too.  That's one of my gripes with the set.  Another is that the production values just feel poor compared to, say, the Pathfinder Beginner Box.

Many would say that a total party kill is one key facet of the D&D experience. But not everyone would, which is why, even with a pre-made set, it's important for the person mentioned in the original post to find out in advance what kind of game they and their players want.

That's a hard thing to quantify for a group that's never touched D&D.  Most of the players probably have some expectation of what it's like, but I doubt that any of them have given any serious thought to the differences between a grand exploration, high politics, and dungeon delve style of game.  In that sense, the beginner's box does a good job of presenting several basic conventions to the players without overloading on anything in particular.  It has its problems to be sure, but I still think it's a fantastic introduction to 5e D&D.
This message had punctuation tweaked by the user at 16:27, Wed 19 July 2017.

It's also incredibly contentious and can turn people off if it's not handled the way they expect. The same can be said, to various degrees, about other aspects of the game. Hence the need for those at the table to talk about what they want. Does the starter set recommend that, by any chance?

The Pathfinder Beginner Box is a nightmare.  Imagine trying to decipher that if you have never played an RPG before.

As a first time RPG player experience, the 5e box is much, much better.